The invention relates to systems and methods for operating mobile, wearable computing devices.
In recent years, the development of mobile computing has made wearable computing devices an appealing alternative to conventional accessories such as watches, jewelry, etc. By incorporating a processor, memory, and a communication device, wearable devices may perform a variety of computational tasks and display a wealth of information to the wearer. Some such devices are capable of communicating with other electronic devices, such as personal computers, telephones, etc., for instance to receive user notifications, messages, and other rich content from the Internet. Some wearable devices execute an operating system and a plurality of applications, commonly referred to as apps. Such apps may receive input from a user/wearer of the respective device, may measure various physical or physiological quantities (e.g., temperature, pressure, heart rate), may measure or otherwise automatically determine a user context and activity (e.g., walking, running, sleeping), and may communicate such data to a remote computing system.
The small size of wearable computing devices inherently limits their power supply. Various energy-saving techniques and strategies were therefore devised specifically for such gadgets. One exemplary technique maintains the device in a low-power sleep mode, and only powers up the processor when needed to perform certain operations. Another conventional power-saving technique comprises pairing the wearable device with a more powerful computing platform such as a mobile telephone, and offloading some of the computations required to operate the wearable device onto the paired computer. In such configurations, the wearable device may become an extension of the mobile telephone, for instance.
As the number and diversity of wearable devices increases, there is a strong interest in developing other effective power-saving techniques.